iguanayou | 2 years ago | on: Should error messages apologize? (2013)
At least they stopped putting "My" in front of everything.
iguanayou's comments
iguanayou | 2 years ago | on: How to Balance Money and Meaning
Where's the data behind that infographic about the leaf blower vs driving a pickup from Texas to Alaska?
iguanayou | 3 years ago | on: Lo-Fi ATC
Awesome!
iguanayou | 3 years ago | on: The perks workers want also make them more productive
My theory: workers are capable of performing focused work for only a fixed number of hours per week.
If productivity is essentially: work done divided by hours worked, then a lot of the things the article mentioned changes the denominator, not the numerator.
Productivity goes up, but the amount of work being done doesn't change. Might as well let people have that other non-working time to themselves.
iguanayou | 3 years ago | on: Doing what you love when the money won’t follow
I taught high school for five years but have been a software engineer for the past ten.
I'd love to teach again - but sadly that would mean going back to a one bedroom apartment in a not-great part of town. Where I'm at now, I have a nice place in the country and the means to pursue hobbies that I couldn't before.
iguanayou | 3 years ago | on: Most people on antidepressants don’t need them
Hear, hear. There's a lot of us in this same boat. These asocial, sedentary IT jobs + hectic lifestyles are out of sync with our biology and psychology.
iguanayou | 3 years ago | on: Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
I like Windows 11!
iguanayou | 3 years ago | on: The other kind of staff software engineer
I've got the same type of deal here. I just worry about skills getting outdated since I'm only working on an in-house system and doing mostly maintenance. But perhaps that fear is overblown.
I could easily hop to a gig with more responsibility and more opportunity for increasing my skills - but also more stress.
iguanayou | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?
Taking longer to get up to speed and setting up a development environment: I'm not sure that's a function of age. It's more likely because development environments truly have gotten larger and more complicated over time.
I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
iguanayou | 4 years ago | on: Americans aren't willing to pay to stop climate change
Exactly. Making the whole "I don't trust the government to do something smart with my money" argument moot. It has been proposed, voters have seen the proposal, and it has been voted down.
iguanayou | 4 years ago | on: Americans aren't willing to pay to stop climate change
1. Carbon tax
2. Cap and trade
The problem is NOT that there have been no good proposed policy solutions. The problem is that voters don't want them. This is why I'm pessimistic on the environment.
iguanayou | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
Very, very common.
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: The dispassionate developer
Agree
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet
Or you could build actual things in an actual shed? This is the same impulse that drives people to build furniture, boats, and model train layouts. To me, the real physical objects are much more fulfilling.
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: Sid Meier's Memoir
This is a great book! Just finished reading it.
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research
See also: Elton John
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world?
I'm reading Sapiens right now. I wouldn't say "mind blown" as I was at least a little familiar with a lot of it before, but the way that Harari writes really makes you think about things differently.
Here are a couple of other books that have been pretty influential for me:
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
"Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people
Right out of the Michael Scott playbook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAxtVMuDYD8
iguanayou | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Practicing bluegrass mandolin, adjunct teaching, and running online classes for my commercial drone school. NOT programming.
iguanayou | 6 years ago | on: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality
Briefly, VFR = Visual Flight Rules. You control the aircraft by looking outside. IFR = Instrument Flight Rules. You control the aircraft strictly by reference to instruments (you need to do this in clouds, for example, when you can't see the horizon).
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